The Green Bay Packers’ 31-25 victory over the Pittsburgh Steelers in Texas drew a U.S. TV audience of 111 million, topping the 2010 final tally by almost 5 million, according to data released on Monday by broadcaster Fox.

“The airing of Super Bowl XLV goes down as Fox’s most-watched night of prime time ever, as well as Fox’s highest-rated night ever among Adults 18-49. It’s also the most-watched night on any network in at least 20 years,” Fox said in a statement.

Last year, 106.5 million watched the New Orleans Saints beat the Indianapolis Colts, surpassing the 106 million who tuned in for the finale of the comedy “M*A*S*H” in 1983.

The Super Bowl in 2009 drew 98.7 million viewers, and the audience in 2008 was 97.5 million.

And it didn’t stop with game day. Over 31 Million people have watched little Darth Vader use his powers to start a Volkswagen on YouTube, and 30 other advertisers actually premiered their much anticipated commercials online in advance of the Super Bowl.

Some other corresponding and interesting stats include:

• Harris Interactive Study. 25% of women exclusively watch for commercials. 12% of men.
• Per Clearspring: Posts mentioning Pepsi Max increased by 3,000% followed by Super 8, and Carmax. Chrysler also experienced a 1300% increase in searches for the brand name followed by Pepsi Max at 950% and Chatter.com at 900%.
• VW’s the Force was the most talked about ad on Twitter. 1 million views in 24 hours before Super Bowl even aired. Increased FB fans to the VW page by 20,000.
• Bud Light spent 1.2 billion for Super Bowl naming rights + ad time (the biggest investment of any brand).

Yes $3 Million is a fortune for a spot, but one could argue the reach extended via social media helps make that number a little more digestible.

The MLB is doing their part, having launched a mobile application – iPhone, Android and Blackberry – that already has been accessed close to 2 million times a day.  On Facebook, 12 million people are either a fan of the MLB itself or one of the 30 team pages. And, another 3 million fans follow MLB-related posts on twitter, which features up to the minute baseball news and information. In fact, Twitter is so popular between athletes of all sports that website Tweeting-Athletes.com has been created to help fans keep track of it all. These numbers are close to triple of what it was just a year ago.

It should come as no surprise that big sporting and entertainment events are becoming more popular and the conversation surrounding them has extended exponentially due to social media. The Super Bowl for example generated more than 60,000 tweets per hour during the February 7^th broadcast and the Oscars, nearly doubled that amount of tweets, with over 100,000 per hour during this year’s awards ceremony. Both events were huge trending topics and both saw huge spikes in ratings over the previous year’s telecast, due in part to social media.

With advancements in social technology and online/mobile social networking, businesses aren’t the only ones seeing the advantages. Sports teams, leagues and professional athletes in particular are seeing the benefits of engaging with fans on this level and are investing more and more resources into it to help ensure a positive image that resonates with their fans.

Whoever you’re rooting for in this series, you will surely find thousands of like-minded fans, just a mouse click or tap of the mobile device away.

Pick Your Bracket

Everyone has their thoughts on who will win.  President Obama picked last year’s winner and this year he is going with the Kansas Jayhawks to win it all. While choosing the tournament winner requires some knowledge of college basketball, the beauty of the 64-team tournament is that there are so many unknown teams and shocking upsets.  Therefore, picking each game is a crapshoot.  Of course, there are experts who think they know the upset specials and Cinderella teams.  CBSSports.com has some upset predictions and Final Four picks, and CollegeHoops.net has plenty of news and analysis to help you out.  It’s worth doing a bit of research before filling out your own bracket.

Create a Pool

All of the major sports sites offer online brackets that you can fill in with your picks.  If you want to set up a pool for your friends or co-workers, I recommend using Yahoo! Sports or CBSSports.com.  Both make it very easy to set up free pools and offer all kinds of tools to help with filling out your bracket and tracking your march to dominance.  In addition, Yahoo! Sports is again hosting their yearly Tourney Pick’em game, where a perfect bracket will net $1 million.

Follow Online

Now that your bracket is all set, you need to watch the games to see if you made the right picks!  CBS and the NCAA have once again teamed up to offer free online streaming of all of the first round games.  Choose between Adobe Flash or Microsoft Silverlight (for higher quality) and enjoy this year’s new features, such as picture-in-picture highlights of other games that you can see without leaving your current game and the ability to pull tourney stats in real-time.

Follow on Your Phone

Last year CBS Sports Mobile debuted the NCAA March Madness On Demand iPhone app that streamed all 63 tournament games live.  This app is back this year, broadcasting every game except the opening round play-in game live via Wi-Fi and AT&T’s 3G network.  The app carries a higher price tag this year ($9.99 vs. last year’s $4.99 price) but will offer added benefits such as scores and alerts, including notifications for when a game is close or headed to overtime, or when there’s an upset in the making. You can also try out PocketBracket, an iPhone and Android app that allows you to create and track brackets, organize pools and follow the progress of the tourney, all for the cost of $1.99.  You can set up pools among friends, or compete with others on the PocketBracket network.

Relive Tourney Memories

As you patiently wait for the tournament to kick off on March 18^th, you can browse the past ten years of March Madness glory on the NCAA Vault.  Check out full games and highlights, and share with your friends via the Twitter and Facebook integration.  Make sure to share the clip of Adam Morrison’s emotional meltdown as UCLA came back to beat Gonzaga in the 2006 Regional Semifinals.  It never gets old.

Good luck and enjoy the tourney!

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out a commercial that will run during the 3rd quarter of #SB44 (don’t forget your official SB 44 has tag y’all!), that was produce by our client, Kia Motors. You can check it out before #SB44 right here:

But I digress again.

Fanscape’s Larry Weintraub wrote another interesting piece for his blog. This post is about Super Bowl Commercials and how the campaigns  are created and executed from different perspectives – on the telecast front, banned front and social media approach. Check it out.

I did some research on Super Bowl ads today. Every year I look forward to the ads and thanks to social media, you can find a lot of the ads (or parts of the ads) online in advance of the big game. The cost of an ad in this year’s Super Bowl is between $2.5 – $2.7 Million per 30 second spot. The reason an ad costs so much is mostly because of the size of the audience watching the Super Bowl but also because the ads themselves get extended shelf life because news programs feature the “top ads” and Internet websites carry the ads.

This year I’ve also found several categories that correspond with the ads such as UGC, Facebook components, and Stunts – i.e. “banned” commercials.  I’ve listed this all below with some commentary.

Superbowl Ads via Facebook

• Budweiser – www.facebook.com/budweiser

Budweiser made it so if you became a fan of their Facebook page, you could vote on what commercial got picked to run during the Superbowl.

• Coke – www.facebook.com/coke

Coke took a very active Social Media approach to their Super Bowl ads in response to Pepsi pulling their Super Bowl ads in favor of digital marketing.  Coke took the social part literal and geared some extensive social media marketing around their Super Bowl ads towards social cause.  Per an article I read:  “Coke plans to give up to $500,000 to the Boys & Girls Clubs of America, and will raise half of that money through a campaign tied to the company’s Facebook page. As of Wednesday, Coke started offering branded virtual gifts that Facebook users can send to their friends for free. For each gift sent, Coke will donate $1 to the Boys & Girls Club.”

Click HERE to read more from Larry’s Blog.

Happy Viewing!

Pepsi, FedEx and GM have all pulled out from Super Bowl commercials this year, while brands like Doritos hope to repeat the success of their Crash the Super Bowl campaign.  At the 2010 Winter Olympics, Visa, one of the event’s largest sponsors for more than twenty years, is expanding their advertising to a multi-platform strategy with a heavy digital focus.  Sony Ericsson, the official mobile sponsor of the 2010 World Cup, has forgone all traditional advertising in favor of a fan-centric approach that reaches out through online channels.  If 2009 was the year that big companies began embracing social media, then 2010 looks like the year that they will be getting engaged in social matrimony.

As the official soft drink of the NFL, Pepsi made a drastic and progressive decision to forgo all Super Bowl television commercials in favor of their $20 million Pepsi Refresh Project digital advertising campaign.  After voting on the site goes live on February 1, the project will give grant money to the winners with the best ideas to “refresh” their community.  This marks the first time a major NFL sponsor will not be airing commercials during the Super Bowl.  Even in a deflated market, 30-second Super Bowl spots are selling for $2.5 million to $2.7 million, making the reach and measurability of digital word-of-mouth strategies that much more appealing.

Just days after the Super Bowl winner is crowned, the opening ceremonies of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games will commence.  This year, major sponsors like Visa have developed campaigns that encompass a variety of digital channels.  They will be utilizing microsites to showcase interviews and personal stories of athletes, along with downloadable athlete widgets and posts on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

From a news media perspective, Web 2.0 and social tools have allowed nearly anyone to become a “reporter.”  For that reason, the IOC has created a rule that only accredited media members may act as journalists with rights to publish audio and moving pictures from the games.  There will apparently be a few exceptions to this rule though as the Vancouver Organizing Committee launched a competition for area students to become a reporter during the games.  Using social media tools like videos, web invites, blog posts and photo journals, the winning students will be filing stories, conducting interviews and hosting an interactive website with other participants from around the globe.  The project, called Students Live, can be followed on Twitter @studentslive.

Sony Ericsson, the official mobile sponsor of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, has followed the suit of Pepsi, Visa and others by going completely with an online approach to customer engagement.  As a truly global event, the audience of the World Cup is hard to target by geographic region and television broadcasts don’t draw the same amount of viewers as the Super Bowl and Olympics.  This is where social media and online channels step in, providing Sony Ericsson with the ability to engage customers and generate conversations that penetrate national and social borders.  Sony Ericsson has already launched a Twitter-based competition between fans of each participating country, a ticket giveaway promotion and a World Cup branded search engine termed the Worldcupopedia.

Adoption of new marketing strategies will always lag years behind the technology itself, but the recent moves by Pepsi, Visa, Sony Ericsson and others indicate that companies are adapting to the changing landscape in full force.  These shifts in advertising budget are merely the precursors to an entire paradigm shift that will continue to see more large companies incorporating word of mouth strategies and social media as a genuine part of their marketing mix.

Yearn to have the appearance of  being more productive while at the office? Check out CantYouSeeImBusy.com a cleaver little site that incorporates games into what looks like an office document, spread sheet or chart. I think my fave is the Breakdown. I won’t tell anyone if you don’t.

With a mantra like ‘Adding insult to everything,’ how can you not love Tauntr. Using the basic premise that sports fans love to taunt, heckle and incessantly mock opposing teams, players and the people who like them, this little gem gives us the platform to let the humor flow – in video, interactive and mock editorial headline form. Hey Tauntr, nice work. Let the sports fan smackdown begin!

This one is special for so very many reasons, but it’s really for our Los Angeles friends and those coming to visit. If you are not already in-the-know, let me introduce you to The Grilled Cheese Truck.

By now you’ve surely heard of the Koji Beef Truck, the Korean BBQ vehicle that travels around Los Angeles delighting those, who are lucky enough to spot it, with taco-style Korean BBQ. Well, The Grilled Cheese Truck makes the rounds throughout Los Angeles as well, but is pure comfort food heaven. TGCT has even taken to Facebook and Twitter to keep fans in the loop of their whereabouts.

If you’ve got traveling food vendors like this in your neck of the woods, of course I want to hear about it. Maybe I’ll do a post on these modern traveling food vendors.

Now that football season is in full swing, we here at Fanscape think it’s about time to take a little look at one of the most successful sports in US history. Whether you’re an every now and then fan or one of the most passionate – you know who you are you face painting season ticket holders and fantasy leaguers – the NCAA and NFL completely captivate us in the Fall and Winter months. And at Fanscape, we’re no exception.

In recent years the game has gone well beyond just what is seen on TV or in the stands; it has become a virtual communications juggernaut. Fans now have unprecedented access to players and teams: fan & team groups on Facebook; message boards galore; Twitter accounts, player websites; and UStream activity, all connecting us in such an intimate way. Because of the expansive amount of options that have been created to link fans to their respective teams and/or players, the doors have swung wide open for brands to captivate their audience in creative new ways.

Contests, promotions, players’ involvement and a team’s interaction all are important aspects of reaching fans, but as marketers we need to make sure our efforts are getting the right message across without being too intrusive. With the every day fan becoming increasingly more savvy on both the consumer and social media front, taking contests beyond entering a name and email is key to a campaign’s success. Some of the best we’ve seen thus far have been those that bring fans directly into the fold; e.g. Dorito’s Crash the SuperBowl and the NFL’s Super Ad.

Football has always been a social affair: gathering with friends, family or a group of fellow fans to watch your favorite team; tailgating, an experience in and of itself; and let’s not forget about actually being in the stadium for the game. True, football has always been about fans coming together to celebrate, but with social media in the mix, fans have the added rush of instant connections and instant interaction on a global scale, whether sitting at a sports bar, at home or in the stands.

In addition to going to games (which is an amazing experience in and of itself and I highly recommend it), hitting up your local sports bar to catch the games, or even having the posse over to check out Sunday Ticket to cheer on your boys, we live in a time where there’s an infinite amount of online choices for the football fan in all of us.

Of course there’s esteemed NFL.com and ESPN.com, where anything you want to know about any team, from stats to scores to game day analysis is just a click away. There’s Justin.tv for the fan that just can’t seem to ever get their favorite team on regular broadcast television. Additionally, there’s a ridiculous amount of team/player/fan sites (OchoCinco’s Twitter page anyone) and fantasy football leagues to further connect with players, dish dirt, smack talk and to fuel the rumor mills.

There’s also some of the funniest commercials and TV segments that you can imagine (and sometimes so bad they’re funny), starring our beloved NFL players. If you haven’t seen these, enjoy. You’re welcome. And get yourself ready for some football already!

The So Sad It’s Funny: NFL Players Mentor Troubled Detroit Lions (Thanks so much The Onion!)

The Just Plain Bad: Jake Delhomme is Bojangles’ Defender of the Fresh Biscuit

The Classic: Peyton Manning’s Saturday Night Live faux United Way Clip